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How To Choose A More Helpful Thought

Some if you may have heard of CBT, or Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. Some of you may not have. I’m going to tell you what it is, some of the benefits, along with a really simple way to use CBT in your day-to-day life.Cognitive Behaviour Therapy is a form of talking therapy that focuses on how your attitude, thoughts and beliefs can affect the way you feel and behave. CBT uses cognitive therapy and behaviour therapy, whilst teaching you coping mechanisms for dealing with your problems. Cognitive therapy examines what you think about, and behaviour therapy examines the things you do and the way you behave.

Put simply, CBT gives you the opportunity to look at the way you think and act in order to improve your attitude, mindset and lifestyle.I’d like to talk to you about “helpful thoughts”, the part of CBT that changed my life. A few years back, much earlier on in my self-development journey, I’d started to notice some of the things I used to say to myself, about myself… And trust me, I don’t think I could repeat most of them. It seemed like everyday I was waking up on a mission to put myself down, so it won’t come as any surprise to you that I was incredibly anxious and in a very low place at the time.

I started to focus on my thoughts, which were impacting my attitude and feelings, and decided to start writing down the negative things I repeatedly said to myself. Within 3 weeks, I’d almost filled an A5 notebook. No kidding. That was when I knew something had to change. I took my A5 notebook of unhelpful thoughts, selected the thoughts I said to myself the most and came up with more helpful thoughts to replace them with. ​For example:

​“I can’t do this” became “I am capable of giving it a go”…

“Things keep getting worse” became “I can get through this, and I’ll see that things can get better”…

“I am so alone” became “I have supportive people around me”…

From that point forward, whenever I caught myself saying something ‘unhelpful’, I would tap my wrist and say, “STOP!”, then replacing it with a more helpful thought. Does that make sense?

Within around a month, my attitude had turned itself around. Of course, I still occasionally have a funny 5 minutes, but I now know how to get myself out of it. CBT gave me hope… Along with the other amazing tools I’ll tell you about in future posts.

Give it a go. What have you got to lose?

Please remember these tools are only based on things we’ve learned. They may be different to things you’ve heard of before. Keep an open mind!